Recent evidence from the United States suggests that the reversal of the gender gap in education was associated with changes in relative divorce risks: hypogamous marriages, where the wife was more educated than the husband, used to have a higher divorce risk than hypergamous marriages, where the husband was more educated, but this difference has disappeared. One interpretation holds that this may result from cultural change, involving increasing social acceptance of hypogamy. We propose an alternative mechanism that need not presuppose cultural change: the gender-gap reversal in education has changed the availability of alternatives from which highly educated women and men can choose new partners. This may have lowered the likelihood of women leaving husbands with less education and encouraged men to leave less educated spouses. We applied an agent-based model to twelve European national marriage markets to illustrate that this could be sufficient to create a convergence in divorce risks.

Over the past two decades, scholars have investigated a multitude of different aspects of motherhood. This article provides a scoping review of research published from 2001 to 2021, covering 115 Social Science Citation Indexreferenced papers from WEIRD countries, with the aim of reconstructing social norms around motherhood and mothers' responses to them. The analysis is theoretically based on normological and praxeological concepts. The findings reveal five contemporary norms of motherhood that reflect both stability and increasing differentiation, and are related to five types of mothers: the norms of being attentive to the child (present mother), of securing the child's successful development (future-oriented mother), of integrating employment into mothering (working mother), of being in control (public mother), and of being contented (happy mother). Relying on an intersectional lens, we analyze mothers' heterogeneous responses to these norms of motherhood, and examine how neoliberal demands build on and perpetuate inequalities.

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Educationally hypogamous marriages, where the wife is more educated than the husband, have been expected to be less stable than other educational pairings, in part because they do not conform to social norms. With the reversal of the gender gap in education, such marriages have become more common than in the past. Recent research suggests that this new context might be beneficial for the stability of hypogamous unions compared to other educational pairings. Here, we investigate how educational matches in married couples are associated with divorce risks taking into account the local prevalence of hypogamy. Using Belgian census and register data for 458,499 marriages contracted between 1986 and 2001, we show that hypogamy was not associated with higher divorce rates than homogamy in communities where hypogamy was common. Against expectations, marriages in which the husband was more educated than the wife tend to exhibit the highest divorce rates. More detailed analysis of the different types of educational matches revealed that marriages with at least one highly educated partner, male or female, were less divorce prone compared to otherwise similar couple types.

Research consistently finds that divorced mothers with full‐time residential children exhibit lower repartnering rates than mothers whose children also stay with their ex‐partners. Yet the selectivity of mothers who take up sole physical custody could have biased the estimations. Using data from the Divorce‐in‐Flanders study (N = 959), the authors model mothers' heterogeneity in the uptaking of sole physical custody as a factor influencing repartnering. They find that failure to account for the endogeneity of sole physical custody leads to a large underestimation of its effect on repartnering. Accounting for its endogeneity, sole physical custody reduced the mother's repartnering rate by 63%, whereas this was just 33% according to the naïve estimate. The results suggest that mothers with full‐time residential children are disproportionally selected among those who have better chances of repartnering but that sole physical custody itself acts as an important impediment to stepfamily formation following divorce.